From the WordPress Daily Post: A juxtaposition is “the act of placing things side by side, especially for the purpose of comparison or contrast.” So, in picture # 1, the juxtaposition of the static painting with the viewer’s ghostly legs. In picture # 2, the side-by-side ceramic thingamajigs. In picture # 3, the giant apples of an art installation contrasted with the small trees and the passers-by.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Juxtaposition = Foils = Unexpected pairings
Self is just whiling away the afternoon. Happy as a clam. She made only one foray into the world, to Safeway for more bottled water. While waiting at checkout, she saw from OK or US magazine that J-Law was engaged to be married to that English boyfriend of hers. Which is definitely tragic for the legions of Joshifer and Everlark fan-dom.
Anyhoo, self just finished reading a passage of BLGF that made her 100% smarter. And she’s only on p. 50! By the time she gets through with the 1,100 pages of BLGF, she’ll no doubt be a candidate for Mensa! Woot Hoot!!!
This is a section from “Croatia.” (The remaining sections are, in order of appearance: Dalmatia, Expedition, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Old Serbia, and Montenegro)
The section begins on p. 50 with the sentence:
If on a king’s death he should leave an idiot heir or none, the nobles would send, perhaps far away, to a man whose fame lay in violence, in order to avoid war among themselves.
It ends about a page later with:
The people screamed in pain.
What? What? Holy Moly! Let’s find out how we got here with the poor peasants screaming!
So self then turns back to the previous page to find out what happened in the interim. The people bring in an alien king blah blah and this king, “terrified of his insecure position in a strange land . . . asked little of the nobles and came down like a scourge on the peasants, and was tempted to plunder them beyond need and without mercy.” He would “demand certain sums from the nobles” and the nobles would then, instead of dipping into their “private treasures,” wring the sums “out of the peasants.” This is bad, but “still graver” is the possibility that “the king’s alien blood would let him make contracts to their disadvantage with foreign powers.” Lest one pooh-pooh such a threat, RW writes:
This danger was very grave indeed. For though there is a popular belief that negotiations to take the place of warfare are a modern invention, nothing could be further from the truth. The Middle Ages were always ready to lay down the sword and sign an agreement, preferably for a cash payment.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you think this is an exhausting way to get through one page of BLGF, then just imagine 950 more of these, since that’s what is involved, apparently. Self better make sure her keyboard arm remains well rested and tuned.
When self feels able to skip, she will skip. This is private reading, not the kind that needs to result in a term paper!
(Collapses)
FROM THE DAILY POST AT WORDPRESS:
This week, in a post created specifically for this challenge, share a photo showing family.
QED, WordPress!
All the photos with family are happy.
BTW, self tried cracking BLGF again this morning, to give it one more shot, but no. She’s definitely moving on.
Good thing Divergent is beginning to reveal more about those factions that everyone in Chicago (in some dystopian future) gets to join. The five are: Abnegation, Candor, Erudite, Amity, or Dauntless.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Self can’t, she simply can’t.
Finish this book.
And no amount of reading erudite reviews on Amazon.com can get her through it.
On p. 43, she encounters this classic collection of RWS. It’s in a section entitled “Zagreb”:
They are standing in the rain, and they are all different and they are all the same. They greet us warmly, and in their hearts they cannot greet each other, and they dislike us a little because it is to meet us that they are standing beside their enemies in the rain. We are their friends, but we are made from another substance. The rich passions of Constantine, the intense, graceful, selected joys and sorrows of Valetta, and Gregorievitch’s gloomy Great Danish nobility are all cut from the same primary stuff, though in very dissimilar shapes.
Woman, what on earth are you talking about? Can’t you just get on with it?
Not to worry, dear blog readers: the next book on self’s reading list is The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. It’s of course about Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress, Sally Hemings. Which means it will be fascinating!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Yes, self, is is OK for you to remain all day in your pajamas. You are a writer. Writers are allowed to spend all day at home. When The Man complains why your annual income is only $5,000, cover your ears. Writers are strange.
Lately, self has added to her daily readings a dose of dystopian (that word again!) fiction. She’s read and re-read Catching Fire. She’s crawling through Divergent.
She suddenly remembers a short story from her childhood in Manila. She remembers the title. She googles.
There it is! The entire short story is available on-line! It was written by Arthur C. Clarke! Self never knew!
(The only thing about the story is — why does the little boy have to be called Marvin)
The story is comprised of these elements: the Colony. The “abyss of space.” Radioactive aftermath.
It is a very, very short story. Surprisingly short.
Here’s the link.
Stay tuned.
Self went browsing for on-line reviews of Black Lamb, Grey Falcon (which she always does when she’s wavering), and after reading a couple of meaty ones on Amazon, has decided that she should approach the book as a travelogue. Because then it works.
And now she also has a word to describe the affliction of a Rebecca West Sentence (henceforth to be known as RWS): prolixity.
Self’s impatience about Black Lamb, Grey Falcon (henceforth to be known as BLGF) stems from the fact that she just finished reading Jane Goodall. Goodall is a writer who makes it easy for readers to step into her world because she is vivid without being circumlocutious.
On the other hand, when Rebecca West gets lumped together in a train carriage with German passengers in first class, one simply doesn’t know whether to believe her, because she turns them all into caricatures. (Earlier, she called them all kinds of names in her head, but now she’s had time to get used to them. If this is the way she’s going to be writing about each and every person she meets on her journey, then no wonder the book is over a thousand pages):
They were all of them falling to pieces under the emotional and intellectual strain laid on them by their Government, poor Laocoons strangled by red tape. It was obvious that getting the population into this state the Nazis had guaranteed the continuance of their system; for none of these people could have given any effective support to any rival party that wanted to seize power, and indeed their affairs, which were thoroughly typical, were in such an inextricable state of confusion that no sane party would now wish to take over the government, since it would certainly see nothing but failure ahead . . . I reflected that if a train were filled with the citizens of the Western Roman Empire in the fourth century, they would have made much the same complaints.
And, just before getting up to make herself some coffee, self reads this (p. 33):
A little while later my husband and I went and had dinner in the wagon-restaurant, which was Yugoslavian and extremely good. When we came back the businessman was telling how, sitting at his desk in his office just after the war, he had seen the bodies of three men fall past his windows . . .
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Rebecca West’s sentences are like architectural monuments. They’re so heavy and self can’t make sense of some of the more ornate (literary) flourishes. And because self doesn’t want to spend the next month or so reading a book whose contents she will probably forget as soon as she closes the covers, she might as well move to the next book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed, who is a professor of Law at New York Law School.
Have spent most of the winter reading non-fiction (In the Shadow of Man, How I Found Livingstone in Central Africa — both enthralling books) The trend continues with The Hemingses of Monticello.
Next up are two books by Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth and Namesake. To rest self’s weary brain, self is also reading concurrently: the YA novels Divergent and Catching Fire.
Still haven’t gotten past p 3 of Divergent During this scene, the heroine is riding on a crowded bus with her brother, Caleb. And this is what ensues:
He also inherited my mother’s talent for selflessness. He gave his seat to a surly Candor man on the bus without a second thought.
The Candor man wears a black suit with a white tie — Candor standard uniform. Their faction values honesty and sees the truth as black and white, so that is what they wear.
Must say, self loves that description of the Candor man wearing “a black suit with a white tie” — Very clever, Veronica Roth!
And now to Catching Fire, the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy. The two District 12 victors, Katniss and Peeta, must engage in combat again. Katniss has formulated a rather weird plan that Peeta shoud live, not her:
The beauty of this idea was that my decision to keep Peeta alive at the expense of my own life is itself an act of defiance. A refusal to play the Hunger Games by the Capitol’s rules. My private agenda dogtails completely by my public one. And if I really could save Peeta . . . in terms of a revolution, this would be ideal. Because I will be more valuable dead. They can turn me into some kind of martyr for the cause and paint my face on banners, and it will do more to rally the people than anything I could do if I was leaving. But Peeta woud be more valuable alive, and tragic, because he will be able to turn his pain into words that will transform people.
Methinks Katniss sounds a little “mental” in the above passage, but perhaps her 17-year-old-ness makes her susceptible to such large and fantastic notions as “Peeta would be more valuable alive, and tragic . . . ”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Self finished In the Shadow of Man yesterday. Oh, she was heartbroken over the loss of individual chimpanzees. She found the demise of Mr. McGregor particularly harrowing.
Self still doesn’t know whether chimpanzees and people can really be friends, but points to Goodall: she bravely admits at the end that she made mistakes in the course of her research, most of them in the beginning. Perhaps carried away a bit by her awareness that no one had attempted to conduct a long-term study of chimpanzees in their natural environment, and desperate to initiate contact, she had lured the chimps with bananas, and induced them to come closer and ever closer to her. But the last half of the book more than made up for the first half.
She’s only a few pages into the 1,000-page behemoth that is Black Lamb Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West, but already she’s enthralled. The King of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseille in October 1934. West was in a “London nursing home,” recuperating from a minor operation, when she heard about the assassination. West tells a nurse: “Switch on a telephone! A most terrible thing has happened . . . the King of Yugoslavia has been assassinated.”
“Oh, dear!” the nurse responded. “Did you know him?”
“No,” I said.
“Then why,” asked the nurse, “did you think it’s so terrible?”
It turns out West, from the time she was a little girl, had always idolized Queen Elizabeth of Austria (“One of the most beautiful women who ever lived.”). Here’s how West describes her in the Prologue:
How great she was! In her early pictures she wears the same look of fiery sullenness we see in the young Napoleon: she knows that within her there is a spring of life and she is afraid that the world will not let it flow forth and do its fructifying work. In her later pictures she wears a look that was never on the face of Napoleon. The world had not let the spring flow forth and it had turned to bitterness.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 